Today I wanted to discuss NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) that was held back in September. I know that a few weeks have passed since the event, but we've been so busy working on CULA that we haven't quite had the time to write about it! At GTC, the CULA team officially released CULA 1.0. For any of you that were there, I think we can agree that it was a great show. Thank you to any of you that stopped by our booth, we're always excited to meet people using CULA.

While at the show, the CULA team also had the chance to meet with many of our collaborators at NVIDIA. It was great to finally put a face to many of the people we have worked with over the past year. For those of you who weren't there, you missed out on some great CULA Cakes!

We got a lot of great feedback from the show, and we're excited to be incorporating that feedback into CULA as we look beyond 1.0. Over the next few posts we'll be talking about some of that feedback and how it influenced many of the features that you'll find in CULA 1.1. We'll also be talking about the next generation GPU architecture NVIDIA's announced at GTC and how it will benefit CULA. Until then, thanks for reading and check back soon!

With the release of CULA 1.0, we (the CULA team) thought it would be a great idea to interact more closely with our users. Before today, we've interacted with many of you on our forums and via email, but we'd like to extend our communication in ways for which the forum isn't quite the appropriate outlet. To meet this goal, we've decided to start up our very own blog!

The CULA blog will be the resource for what's going on in CULA and related areas. We want this blog to be a mix of technical information, marketing magic, and other things we (and hopefully you) find cool. We hope that it contains information that can help you in your work, will entertain you, and will keep you coming back!

So let's start basic with some introductions - what is CULA and who developed it? CULA is a dense linear algebra library implemented with CUDA. CULA was started because there was an obvious need for a set of linear algebra functions for the GPU based on a large number of requests in many academic papers as well as on many internet forums, including the official CUDA forums. With the help of NASA and NVIDIA we (EM Photonics) brought CULA to the market. CULA is the result of many years of effort and GPU programming experience. An interesting aside: EM Photonics was one of the first companies to release a fully-capable, free program that demonstrated the power of GPUs for general purpose computing that was based on the old-style of OpenGL GPGPU programming. Since then we’ve happily transitioned our work to the CUDA world.

What makes GPU computing (especially CUDA) so exciting? Whether it be modeling, visualization, image processing, physics, or mathematics, your computation time is significantly faster on the GPU! With the release of CULA, which is modeled after the LAPACK interface, we've brought the power of GPU computing to each of these fields as well as many more beyond this small list. We are extremely proud of CULA and are excited to continue building the next generation of GPU computing.

As we add more posts to this blog, we'd like you to stay up to date. Visit our site often or subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date. You'll be hearing from us again soon!